Monthly Archives: May 2016

Nearly 40 years after Bernard Ross disappeared from his Maine home, his parents received a mysterious letter about him, renewing police interest in his missing-person case.

The letter, about Bernard Ross Jr., who was 18 when he disappeared in 1977 after leaving the family’s home in Fort Kent, arrived at the parents’ home “a couple of months ago,” according to The Portland Press Herald.

The police disclosed the existence of letter, hoping that public attention might coax the author of the correspondence to contact police.

The letter to Ross’ parents referred to a report about him published in The Kennebec Journal.

Maine State Police Lt. Troy Gardner said that authorities are not releasing the contents of the letter and that the family is going through a wide range of emotions after being in touch with police throughout the years.

There are few prospects more enticing than the possibility that one has stumbled upon a genuine mystery, one that might be solved with a combination of diligence and brain power. It is the basis upon which countless movies, books, and TV shows are founded, particularly those dealing with spies and detectives. The Reddit community thought it had discovered just such a mystery when, a little over five years ago, a strange subreddit known as r/A858DE45F56D9BC9, containing only strings of letters and numbers, appeared on the site. What happened next is detailed in an investigative piece by Robert Guthrie for The Kernel.

Reddit’s users decided that the seemingly random characters on this subreddit “looked like a code” and thus began to decipher the posts there, in some cases devoting huge amounts of time to doing so. Subreddits about r/A858 sprang up, and theories began to emerge about the

An amateur detective from Great Bookham claims to have solved a 50-year-old murder mystery.

True crime author and photographer Monica Weller has spent the last seven years investigating the murder of Buckinghamshire GP Dr Helen Davidson, who was murdered on November 9 1966 while walking her dog.

Dr Davidson’s body was found the next day, her dog Fancy still by her side, but the killer’s identity has baffled police for the last five decades.

Since developing an interest in the case Ms Weller has sifted through countless press cuttings and documents, as well as speaking to hundreds of people.

The former charity development manager has produced a non-fiction book about the crime, called Injured Parties, Solving the Murder of Dr Helen Davidson.

She told the Advertiser: “I had gone to Amersham in Buckinghamshire to talk about Ruth Ellis, the last woman in Britain to be hanged. Afterwards a lady contacted me, she was impressed

A national organization is planning to take another step Wednesday to publicize the disappearance of a local teenager 15 years ago.

The National Center for Missing Exploited Children has scheduled a press conference at 10 a.m. concerning the case of Sarah Kinslow. The agency is partnering with Clear Channel Outdoor Americas in recognition of National Missing Children’s Day to unveil a billboard detailing Kinslow’s disappearance, at 8612 Airport Freeway in North Richland Hills.

The event is expected to feature Louise Kinslow, the mother of Sarah Kinslow, Greenville Police Department Investigator Phillip Spencer and representatives from both the National Center for Missing Exploited Children and Clear Channel Outdoor Americas.

Press events were planned across Texas Wednesday, for the campaign timed to begin with National Missing Children’s Day and running through June. Clear Channel Outdoor Americas will also display

A little more than five years ago, a previously unused Reddit account began posting seemingly random strings of numbers and text in a new subreddit it had created. To the casual eye, there wasn’t much to see. The subreddit shared the same inscrutable set of numbers and letters as its moderator; the sidebar and comments provided no clarifying information.

If it was a mystery, it appeared a banal one. Like any number of niche subreddits, it seemed to serve some unknown, private purpose. Whoever was using it had no interest in drawing attention, and so it remained ignored and forgotten, letters and numbers quietly churning away in a overlooked corner of the web.

It’s not clear how the larger Reddit community discovered r/A858DE45F56D9BC9—whether by chance or through subtle hints—but soon enough, redditors saw those strings of letters and numbers and decided they looked like a code. And if it

When the unidentified girl was found fatally shot in the Caledonia cornfield in 1979, the Internet was years from being a household tool for transmitting and receiving information. But, as the years passed and the Internet became a societal constant, Livingston County Sheriff John York predicted that it would one day answer the mystery of the girl’s identity.

What he did not know was that an online network of citizen sleuths had been following the case of “Cali Doe,” as the teenager was called. They’d been waiting for the slightest hint that could lead to her identification. And one California man in particular constantly drew new versions of her possible appearance, designed to show what she may have looked like before her death.

From the time Bethlehem Township police Cpl. Shaun Powell posted the photo on Facebook — a crinkled piece of the hit-and-run driver’s truck identifiable only by a partial logo that said “over 45 years experience” — it took only minutes for someone to crack the case.

A reply to the post, in March 2015, alerted township police to the business whose trucks fit the look of the crumpled metal remnant. Powell posted an updated photo later that day when authorities tracked down the damaged vehicle.

“In 12 minutes we solved a mystery hit-and-run. It’s amazing,” Powell said. “And all we had to do is post it. The takeaway for me is that [social media] is totally worth it.”

Police departments, long dependent on traditional media outlets to distribute crime news, can now take the information straight to residents. Powell said Bethlehem Township authorities have found Facebook to be especially good when it comes

In Saskatoon, Canada, a suspected car thief crashed a flatbed truck into a parked Ford F-150. Local residents heard the crash, and went outside to film. The resulting video shows the world’s most pathetic attempt to flee a crime scene, as the perpetrator flounders with his busted-up Ram 5500.

A hit and run, by definition, involves an accident and a subsequent flight from the crime scene. The driver of the Ram 5500 in the video below managed the first part of “hit and run” just fine, but the latter part caused him some trouble. Look at the Ram driver struggle with the severely wounded flatbed truck:

The Saskatoon police say the accident occurred around 5:40AM on Saturday, and that the Ram 5500 had been stolen